<div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Jul 3, 2010 at 2:07 AM, Jozsi Avadkan <<a href="mailto:jozsi.avadkan@gmail.com">jozsi.avadkan@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> input: <a href="http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=MqPXZwc3" target="_blank">http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=MqPXZwc3</a> output: <a href="http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=8QCkp4yv" target="_blank">http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=8QCkp4yv</a> it will be a long day.. :D could someone please help with it? i have to make a "one liner" that get's the input, and gives the mentioned output. </blockquote><div>First, I'm not really sure you want the exact output you posted. 1) The second and third href="..." elements after "netbsd" seem to be different from all the other multi-line groups. Could this be a typo? 2) The pipe symbol ("|") at the end of most groups also seems a bit odd. I would guess the last of each group would not want one, as is the case with the first group. Second, perl is my tool of choice for this sort of thing, and if you can tolerate longer lines than usual, it can be made a one-liner. This version puts pipe ("|") after all links, but does not treat netbsd specially. I'm assuming that your shell is BASH. The quoting might need to be different in other shells. perl -n -e '$od=qq+/+; while (<>) { chomp; ($dir, $stuff)=split /\//, $_, 2; @all = split /\//, $_; $thing = $all[$#all]; $thing =~ s/\.html$//; if ($dir ne $od) { print qq+ \n+ if $od ne qq+/+; $od = $dir; print qq+ $dir \n+; } print qq:<a href="$dir/$stuff">$thing</a> | \n: } print qq+\n+;' </div></div> This really is a one-liner, so I've also attached it as a file in case mail software creates line breaks. If you can tolerate it as a separate script, a multi-line version would be much more readable. I still use Perl a lot for short things like this, even though it's one of the less-readable languages I know. I've moved on to Python for most of the stuff I used to use Perl for, because I can read the code a year later. -- Kevin O'Gorman, PhD